Financial

$2790.35 + $493.39 + $93.95 + $23.5

(APB Referrals + MaxBounty Referrals + Teespring eBooks + JVZoo)

Total = $3,401.19

Holiday – Again – committing to no holidays till progress

10 days of November was spent in Malaysia. For everyone that’s ever gone on holiday, you’ll know that holiday mode starts a few days before and lasts about a week after the actual holiday. That’s what happened here. I can’t really say I did anything at all for half of November but I did make some major changes to the process of my kindle book publishing.

Before I explain what these changes were, since we’re on the holiday topic, here’s a commitment to myself to NOT go on holiday till I achieve something!

I’d like to hit at least $3,000 in kindle revenue via a new income source before I go anywhere. it’s not good to reward yourself when you don’t deserve it. Rewards can work real well when given at the right time which is why I’m going to do this.

Kindle Progress

I need to switch things up here. I think I’ve done something I promised myself I’d never do. I overcomplicated things. I made the process too long and forgot about testing and validation.

There was a new success story at AffPlaybook. Marco, (he might be here somewhere!), made around 3k in his first month at kindle! That’s pretty damn huge I have to admit. His method? Pump out as many books as you can in different niches until something bites, then focus in on that niche.

Don’t worry about getting it professionally edited and checked, don’t worry about an amazing book cover, just get it out there and see what happens.

No matter what industry or business process you’re tying to break into, this is always the best approach. It was my approach to Teespring which is why I had so much success with it. The reality is that 20% of the tasks contribute to 80% of your success.

Read that again if you need to.

That means, it’s better to focus on these tasks instead of other, small things that might matter a little bit, but in the larger scheme of things drain time that could be better spent else where.

Anyway, back to our success story. Learning from that, I’m going to apply the same approach. I’m hoping to release 15 books by the end of this year, in different niches. I’ll see what results I get back and take it from there. I wanted to make 20 books before I re-analyse so I’m going to keep going till I hit that number.

Reading Quora, (funnels)

I’ve mentioned my love for quora a few times. It’s an app that works like yahoo answers except it’s set up as a feed. You can join topics you’re interested in and everyday you’ll be presented with questions with top quality answers related to your topic. There are some very qualified people on quora, for each topic. Self made Millionaires are plentiful which make for some cool insights.

The other day I was browsing the app when someone explained the importance of funnels. I never paid much attention to this, I felt I didn’t need to just yet but for some reason, I decided to read this.

Funnels can exponentially increase your earnings. It’s the difference between six figure companies and 7 figure companies. Funnels are the idea of strategically directing people through a series of email sequences that build relationships and sell them products.

You start off with a bait to get an opt in.

Then build a relationship with them so they know where you came from, who you are, what you’re doing and can relate.

You then pitch them something small, maybe a $7 ebook.

Then you pitch them something higher priced, more quality, now that they trust your products.

And you keep selling them higher things of value, (of course you need to PROVIDE them with that amount of value too).

I’ve seen people go from selling $7 ebooks to $5k seminars. It’s insane what people are doing with funnels!

I’ve never employed this strategy, mostly because I’ve always wanted to do things for free. My Teespring ebooks were the first products I’ve ever made and I put a lot of effort into them. I realised that making a product makes me create something much more valuable then free content and so it’s a good way of creating value on another level.

It was just interesting to see how real business works. At the end of the day, I have so much to learn and reading quora always reminds me on how much of a novice I still am at business.

Routining

I wrote a blog post about this the other day. Routining is the only way I get things done. By creating a system in my brain and following it to the point it doesn’t feel normal to NOT do it, you can reach a lot of your personal and financial goals.

If it was up to you to start work whenever you wanted, I can guarantee that most of you will start work at 10-11am. Maybe even later. The fact that you have a set time you need to be at work creates a routine in your mind so your body becomes forced to follow it.

The way to create a routine that sticks is to make it easy at the start. Don’t make a killer routine that takes a lot of effort and is a complete 180 to what you’re doing now.

Start small. Wake up and sleep an hour earlier. Have a big glass of water every morning. Small wins will help you build momentum and once you build the right amount of momentum, the world is your oyster.

I tried so many times to get into routines that were perfect for me. The only problem was that they were so different to my current routine that they would be difficult to implement. Nowadays I make it easy and start small. Every week I’ll add something else and by the end of the month, I’ll be in my desired routine. This is the way to do it.

Making Things a Process

There is only one way to make money in business. That is, to work your butt off.

In fact, there is no other way to learn business, especially at the start. You need to grind it out. I know people that straight away think about outsourcing when they come across a certain idea. It might be a good idea BUT I feel you need to know some parts of the process yourself before you can start outsourcing it.

My approach has always been to do everything myself at the start till I can map out the process and THEN outsource things. This way, I know what the process entails and I can outsource accordingly. I know how much to spend, I know how long it takes, I know which tasks should be outsourced to different people, etc.

I also find people that want to just outsource things are the lazy type. The need to outsource straight away proves that you’re not wiling to put in the work to make things happen. You need to switch this thinking if this is you. You outsource once things are working well and you need to lighten the load.

Half Done Plans are Better Than not Launching at All

This is true in most cases. If it’s affiliate marketing we’re talking about, then I think I can even go as far as saying it applies in all cases. Too many times people want to get things perfect before they send something out into the real world. Sometimes it’s the fear of their product making them no sales that’s scary. In fact this is the most dominant reason.

A business man that jumps in with half a plan is more likely to succeed compared to someone that waits till their plan is perfect.

There are so many people in Australia that come from ethnic backgrounds and make it big. They would have made tonnes of mistakes but they took a risk and are now much wealthier than most natural born Aussies.

When I think of an idea, I make it a point to put it out there that very day.

For example if I want to make a magazine subscription website for grandparents to learn technology, I’ll quickly design a cover, put it on a landing page with a buy now button, run 100 people to the website and see if any click the ‘Buy’ button.

If there’s a significant number, then I continue, if not, I work on something else.

Compare this to working on the actual magazine for a week then marketing around different forums and blogs only to learn the exact same thing.

This is the smart way to do it and it’s how I’d encourage everyone to approach their business ideas. Too much time gets wasted on ideas that just aren’t a good product – market fit.

Ending Words

This year has been a lot of experimentation. It’s time to stop experimenting and to stick with a model that works. That’s the best way to do it in my opinion and is what most of this year proved.

We have one more month till the end of the year, I hope everyone reaches their goals!

Talk soon,

Mateen

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Blogging Efforts

Chugging Along

Just like that, October has gone by. Every month I look back to the last time I wrote a monthly report and wonder if I feel good about my progress or not.

Progress can come in many different ways. It can come as internal knowledge growth which is a slow, patient process. Many times you hardly notice it because things don’t seem to change outwardly until all these small learnings come together.

Most of this year, I feel I’ve progressed in the above way. I knew if I had to learn long term income strategies, I would need to sacrifice my short term gains. I had to sacrifice that additional 2-5k/m and commit to learning a bunch of new skills that would take time, effort and money to learn.

Was it worth it? Who knows! All I know is that in business, as long as you’re learning new things and persisting throughout all those down times to focus on something good at the end of the tunnel, you’re doing the right thing and will eventually get there.

Kindle Book Testing/Approach

Like everything in business, there’s a ‘mainstream’ or ‘correct’ way to do things. Of course you can go about getting the same results a variety of different ways but for the most part there’s a process that works for successful entrepreneurs in any field and you should be looking to emulate them at the start of your journey. Once you achieve what they achieve then you can start varying things up, adding your own twist etc.

With Kindle, the process is to publish books, market them, get people to sign up to your book lists, use them to launch your next book, repeat. You do this 50 times and might have 2-3 big winners and a list of happy paying kindle customers who are patiently waiting for your book releases.

If you don’t follow the process above, you’ll suffer a little. You can spend hours, months, years writing your book but again, that’s just one part of the process. You NEED to have a marketing strategy in play. It doesn’t have to elaborate or full-scale, just something you can track the results of. Something you can learn of and use for the next marketing strategy for your books.

My Kindle approach has been a little different then most. I’ve written a few 3-5k word books. It takes me 2-3 days to pump these out. The sole purpose of these books are to offer them as free downloads and to use them as opt-in generators. The more people that download them, the more I’ll have opting into my list. Once I have 1-200 people, then I can use the list to launch my premium books, (10-15k words).

The strategy makes sense in my head. I hate launching things without an initial fan base. Results are always disappointing.

Kindle Books Writing

I have no idea how I’ve been able to continuously write so much. I’ll do 2-4k words a day, every weekday. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to it. Maybe somewhere deep inside, I actually enjoy it.

The curiosity of how these books will perform once they’re out there is a big drive to get them done. I have about 6 books ready to be published and marketed. For some reason, it’s easier for me to open a new word document, label it something interesting, and start a new book. Maybe it’s because it’s the part of the process I’m most comfortable with.

Publishing and Marketing your book is scary. It’s scary because it’s when the real world will tell you whether your book is good or not. It’s scary thinking all those hours spent writing could amount to nothing. At the end of the day, this is the part of the process I, (we), should be focusing on. It’s the marketing part that makes the big difference. I’ve seen crap books sell real well because they’re cover is great, they have decent ratings and most likely have a launch list.

Instagram Account Growth

My side project has been pretty exciting. It’s reached 2.5k followers in around 2 weeks. Updating it takes less than a minute of my time and I’ll post something every 2-3 hours.

I should really download a tool that lets me schedule posts but at the moment, I’m still deciding whether or not I want to continue with this. Most likely the answer to that is yes. I’ve seen many accounts over 30k doing shoutouts for people. It’s safe to assume they’re getting paid for this.

I know it’ll still take me a while to get there but most of my time has been spent growing these organically. I’m going to spend some money next month paying for shoutouts and monitoring results. I’d love to grow it to 50-100k by the end of this year and wouldn’t mind spend around $1k doing so.

Let’s see what happens, I’ll report next month.

Decluttering the mind/acting on ideas

Most of this year, I’ve forced myself to stop writing ideas down and to actually start implementing them. There’s no point having a list of 100 awesome ideas and never acting on any.

I guess it’s a nice way to train your creativity but if you want to make money and have a career in business, you need to do more then just that.

There needs to be a point where you stop planning, strategising, idea listing and start implementing. It’s good to plan and strategise but if you’re making this more than 70% of your daily business activities, you’ve got it all wrong. No amount of writing and reading is going to get you money.

At the start of this year, I had a tonne of ideas I wanted to implement. I was sure that they’d make me money. I implement all of them. Every single one. None of them gave me the results I was looking for but with each passing project, I learnt what not to do. This is where the real value was. I also decluttered my mind so it focus on my main task.

This time, I’m focusing on kindle. Why? Because there are others making a lot of money with it, consistently. I’ve learned to follow someone else’s process till I make it my own.

Testing Before you Commit

I really need to address this point.

I’ve seen a lot of people, myself included in the early days, commit to projects without testing it. They have a vision and work on that vision for months, years, even decades!

They’ll continue writing their eBooks or perfecting their product/service/website/etc. You need to start doing things in reverse.

In business we test first, then we commit. Want to start a local lawn mowing business? Before you go around paying for logos and accountants, door knock 50 homes and offer to mow their lawn. See how much they’re willing to pay and if you like the type of work. Is it for you? Does it make enough money for you to stick with it? Are you happy? It’s free to do this and will probably take a full day but can save you thousands and months spending time on something that can be something you don’t want to do.

Another example would be to run some FB ad traffic to some eBook Covers. See what people click on most. Is a particular cover giving you really bad results? Good, you’ve just saved yourself a couple of months of working on a bad idea. Is one giving you great results? Even better! Now start working on it. At least this way you know it will succeed.

Doing things like this can help you grow a lot faster then most people in business. Once you’ve accepted this way of thinking and approach to business, it’ll take you to the next level.

What Yearly Goals should you look to Achieve

With the year almost over, I’m starting to reflect on what’s happened in 2015. Am I where I want to be?

In some ways I am, in many ways I’m not.

I’ve always set specific financial goals which have been easier to work towards in paid affiliate marketing. My income was almost directly related to the amount of effort I’d put in so all I had to do was maintain my motivation levels and work ethic to get the income I wanted.

With long term strategies, it’s a little different. You work on an idea for a few weeks to a few months and realise it’s a crap idea, then you take your learnings and move on. You learn a LOT but financially, are kind of in the same place.

It’s up to you on setting your goals. I’ve always had the opinion that, as long as you can look back a year and be satisfied with how much you’ve frown internally, you’re doing great.

– Mateen

Want to get Serious with Internet Marketing? Join us on Aff Playbook Below!

TOTAL

$3,111.12 U.S.D

First Completely Red Month!

This is the first time I’ve had not a single day in profit! It was a bit of a shock at the start but as I analysed my work it became clearer to me why. Most of this month was spent working on some products I’ll be releasing on my blog. Products covering basically everything I’ve done to this point in my affiliate career to earn me over 200k profit so far, (in just under 2 years).

I’ve realised the more I focus on one thing, the more the other parts of my business suffers. I’ve never been able to split my focus equally. I know from reading work from noteable entrepreneurs that ultimate focus on one thing is a huge factor in driving success. Most of last year was spent 95% focussed on Teespring. I’d wake up and have campaign ideas running through my head. I’d go out and zone in and out of conversation with people because again, I’d be going through campaign ideas. I was OBSESSED with it. Whatever I’ve been obsessed with, I’ve conquered. Obsession usually leads to an insane amount of work.

This month, I wasn’t obsessed about anything. June made me realise that and I really had to re-evaluate my business and so was working in and out of a bunch of projects.

Quora – My new Morning Read

I don’t know how many of you have heard of this app, but it’s basically become my morning and evening read. It’s an app that has a ‘yahoo answers’ style of question and answer type threads except you can select specific topics that interest you which will be presented on your ‘feed’ basically the same as FaceBook. Noteable people like Mark Cuban will take some time out to actually answer questions and so a lot of the advice there is on a completely different level.

I read tonnes of answers from self made millionaires who had sold their company for 10s of millions of dollars. Not once, not twice, but many times over.

There seemed to be a pattern to their success. They’re definitely not like me, working on the short term to get by. It seems the millionaires and billionaires out there have enough faith in their creative abilities to nurture something until it’s big enough to be worth millions.

This doesn’t mean working on a project for years hesitating to put it out there to get real customer feedback. It means working on a something that provides value and/or solves a problem. I’ve been hearing this for ages but it didn’t really click to me until I started reading it over and over again in these quora answers. Entrepreneurs that make it huge don’t go our and monetise their work straight away. They aim to solve a problem and once they have a massive customer base, THEN, they’ll monetise it.

Take Whatsapp for example. It started off being a free messenger app. The benefit obviously being that people didn’t have to use phone messaging and could save money using their free wi-fi to send images, videos and texts to their loved ones anywhere around the world. A quick google search will tell you there’s around 420-450MILLION current users world wide. I’ve been getting notifications to pay $1/year to continue using their service. Doing some simple math tells me that they’re earning 400+Million a year charging their customers just $1!

FaceBook started off free. In fact it’s STILL free but we all know where they get their money. Back in the day they didn’t have this many ads. There were hardly any ads, in fact I’m pretty sure there were no ads at all! FB was just a free service for people to come and hang and have a profile about themselves. Once they amassed a gigantic user base, THEN they too started monetising. Mark had always been insanely focussed on growing it’s user base at the early stages of the company and to do that they had to constantly work on providing value.

Even my blog started off as just intending to help people with articles and videos on what I do to make money. It still is focussed on that but I can easily start monetising it even more with adsense and other things.

Bottom line, everything worth big money in the world started off pretty much free and insanely valuable till it had enough raving followers.

Now compare that to us Teespring affiliates or any affiliate for that matter. We’ll make a quick landing page/Teespring campaign and focus on driving sales and generating profit. Has the idea of ‘creating value’ occurred to you while doing any of this? It hasn’t for me – particularly in my paid affiliate marketing endeavours. I started to realise all of this, this month and so have begun my transition into creating something based around these principals.

Maxbounty Surprise

One of my Maxbounty referrals did exceptional in June. During the early stages of my blog, I would post quite a lot on PPV marketing so I must have made the referral then but I earned around $1,115 just from that one referral! I get 5% of the revenue generated which means he raked in 20k+ revenue for that month. Good for him!

It was certainly a nice little surprise when the money was deposited in my bank. You never know where money will come from as an affiliate. Every year seems to be different and I’ve given up on the whole forecasting thing due to how different things seem every 3 months.

Teespring to Teechip

Recently I made the switch from Teespring to Teechip. Reason being is that they pay out for every order made instead of having a minimum goal limit necessary to print. After calculating that I’ve lost at least 3k with Teespring because of their minimum goal rules I thought I’d make the switch with to Teechip.

This month however, I went BACK to Teespring and so again, had a bunch of orders that didn’t print due to the low print orders. Not sure what the best thing to do here. I’ll probably go back to using Teechip because their analytics were a bit more detailed and useful and you could up sell on working products. If I DO come across a working campaign however I think it’s worth split testing different custom platforms to see which performs better. Next time I’ll split test the top ones and report on my findings.

Booster Packs

I briefly mentioned this earlier but basically I’ll be releasing some, what I call, ‘Booster Packs’ related to certain methods I’ve used to make money in Affiliate Marketing. There will be a Booster Pack for List Building, Teespring Designing, Teespring Marketing, Blogging, etc, each being sold separately and as a package.

Each pack will come with a course pdf and set of videos to get you up to speed in gaining the knowledge required to start making money in any of these topics. Remember, no matter how many courses you buy and read, you won’t get results unless you follow it up with a large amount of ACTION.

The goal is to get you up to speed to compete with everyone else. It should be beneficial to everyone and anyone no matter what level you’re on but is specifically tailored to newbies/intermediate affiliates.

More on this next month.

Ramadan

Lastly, During the later stages of this month, fasting season began for us and so most of the time all I wanted to do was sleep. Having no food or water for 14 hours, energy levels were a killer. Once my body adjusted to the change, it started to function properly again and by the end of the month I was my usual self.

Fasting and Freezing weather is a tough combination in Australia but for the most part we have it a lot easier compared to some other countries that are in summer.

Conclusion

June has been more of a realisation month. I think this year itself has been a slow but important year in terms of transitioning my behaviour to break out of just being an affiliate and earning 6 figures to hopefully becoming a proper business owner bringing in 7 figures.

I definitely have a long way to go but I know as long as my mind is in the right place, I’ll get there and so will any one else.

Eid Mubarak to anyone else who celebrated Ramadan and good luck to everyone for July!

– Mateen

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TOTAL

$3,974.22 U.S.D

Stuck! I’ve felt stuck at around this number for the last few months. It’s completely my fault. I haven’t been putting in the hours. Last year, I was doing easy 6-8 hour days of solid work. These days, I’ll be lucky to do 4. In fact, most of the weeks I’m probably working 12 hours all up and my income reports reflect that. I’m going to make a vow to change this in June. To start, let’s try bump this to at least $5,000. Baby steps have always worked best for me. Setting a big goal at the end of the year, broken down to smaller, more achievable goals.

Focusing on Teespring Gem Videos

A lot of my time this month was spent focusing on Teespring Gem Videos. They seem never ending with SO many topics to do! I spend a good 2 weeks working almost exclusively on this and made 1 every day, (on some days I did 2!).

It takes a lot of time and seems to be help full but takes my time out of launching Teespring Campaigns. This blog has become a bit of an addiction and it’s hard to pull myself away to work on my real business but it needs to be done. I’m going to probably blog a couple of times a week, maybe 3, but June will be a heavy focus on Teespring or something else.

Teespring Minimum Sales Requirement Sucks!

I’ve made so many sales in my Teespring Career that I never got paid for. Why? Because they weren’t enough to make the minimum print order. I think this adds up to at least $4k. Remember, back in the day the didn’t have an auto print for when sales reach at least 3. Some times I’d have a goal of 50 and make 35 sales and they wouldn’t be printed! It sucked so much. In many cases I had to buy the rest myself.

These days, it’s a little easier but still annoying. I would cut my losses by almost half if Teespring printed every order. For this reason I’m trying a few different custom print websites. I’m working with Teechip at the moment and it seems to be working well. Their profit margins are way bigger and they print every order! Feel free to suggest others and tell me your experiences.

Working on Long Term Projects

This was another focus this month. There was a lot of experimenting but not really getting anywhere progress wise. I learned how to make BIG lists but I have little to no idea how to continually monetise them. I think the idea is to just keep hitting them with offers/products at a routinely time while at the same time providing them with something valuable. What all these are, I still have to figure out but right now I’m sitting on 15k subscribers lol.

I better work out how to make money off them or my aweber subscription fee will start eating me alive!

The main reason I wanted to learn list building was to learn one of the core essential business skills. Paid marketing, (which is what we do with Teespring),is one. It gets you front end sales and new customers which is great. I need to be able to turn these customers into repeat customers which is where email list building comes in.

I’m going to start working more with the list in June. I’ll email a few offers and see how I go.

Motivation Levels

Last year I would wake up first thing in the morning and throw out 10 campaigns before 7am. That’s right, I’d wake up at 4 or 5am, a totally ludicrous hour, and get straight into it. Why? Because I was so motivated to increase my income and hit my 150k at the end of 2014 which I was JUST shy of. I had nothing else going through my head but this one goal. This year, I’m doing so many things. Boxing, Eating healthy, Gym, Business, Relationships, etc. When you have too many goals, things can get very messy.

From now on, I’m going to spend 8 hours MINIMUM on work related activities, 5 days a week, no excuses! That’s a lot of time to be spending on launching campaigns/growing your business. With this mentality, let’s see if I can get back in the green this year with my Teespring campaigns.

Focusing On Making BIG Money and Getting Rich

That headline sounded a bit like an ebook you would have bought some time during your IM career. The problem with running a revenue generating blog is that you can get very comfortable with the income. I make about $5k Aus which is about an 80k salary, inclusive of taxes. That’s pretty good for the level of work needed to maintain it!

Unfortunately, it’s taken my mind of the bigger goal which was getting RICH. Not making 5k a month but making 100k+ a month. I know that sounds ludicrous but people are doing it. This requires a lot more effort initially and a totally different mind set. For starters, you need to think it’s possible. Check out Pat Flynn & Entrepreneur On Fire for instance. They’re killing it! May income report 525k!? WTH?

There are heaps of others doing as good or even better than this, it makes my income look like peanuts.

Focus on Systems Not Goals

I’m not exactly sure who said this or where I got it from but it was a good little thing to think about. Instead of focusing on Goals we should be focusing on perfecting systems. For example, instead of focusing on losing 20kg, what if we were to focus on getting into a routine of hitting the gym at 8am, first thing in the morning and only eating a set amount of calories/day?

The more we can break down this process and aim for it, the better our chances of hitting it. The goal will be met eventually as you’ve perfected the process to get there. I’ve found that this type of thinking makes ‘the dream’ more achievable. It’s easy to set a goal and ‘think’ your getting there as you work towards it. Focusing on the system lets you evaluate EVERY DAY if you’re doing the right things to get there. So instead of making another goal of hitting 150k this year, I should be focusing on something like,

Launch 10 Teespring Campaigns

Launch 10 CPA campaigns/angles

1 blog post

Spend 2 hours on long term projects

(Get into the routine of doing the above set of tasks every day!)

Eating Habits – A Big Contributor

One of the biggest, (if not, THE biggest), contributor to how much I work on my business per day is my diet. I find the more junk I put into my body, the more it rejects the desire to do anything productive. I feel lethargic ALL day long and the bed seems like the best place to spend my daily 24 hours.

Eating healthy totally kills this mindset. Your body won’t allow you to sit on your bed. You’ll have too much energy of that. I’ve experienced it before. When I was at the peak of my diet, I was able to work all day non stop, with no sleep breaks and still be able to bounce up in the morning ready to do another shift. The more raw fruit and veggies I eat, the better my work performance.

Conclusion

May was more working on my long term projects and slowly getting back into my Teespring roots. You see, to make the profits I was last year, I need to start launching more campaigns. That’s the simple truth. It worked time and time again last year but I’ve been way to slack in 2015. It’s time to realize this and make a decision to be persistent.

See you guys in June!

– Mateen

Want to get Serious with Internet Marketing? Join us on ecomuniverse Below!

TOTAL INCOME$15,155.57

Gotta love those 5 figure months…

Finally, some Big Numbers

12.6k might not be that big for a lot of seasoned IMers but for little ol’ me, it’s quite a big deal. Especially when you add another 2.5k from my blog and convert that total to Aussie dollars by multiplying by a factor of 1.2.

That’s an 18k profit month! Full-time work would bring me 4k/month after Taxes so I’ve just bought in 4.5 months of full-time employment in one month! Although my mind doesn’t really think like this anymore. Attempting to hit 10k months has become the norm as the affiliates in my circle are doing much more.

Still, seeing a bank account increase of 18k is awesome.

Confessions of a Teespringer

One thing I haven’t mentioned previously, (at least I don’t think I have), was that 95% of my campaigns have come from every country BUT the United States. In fact, most have been targeting Australia and New Zealand.

Why? The same campaigns worked a lot better in these countries when compared to the States. I would think it’s because Aus/NZ were less saturated. The same campaigns, when launched in U.S., would flop big time. The problem with these countries however, was the considerably smaller audience size. A profitable campaign would last about a week and bring in 1k or so but I’d hardly have anything over 100 sales. I’d be in awe of people posting screenshots of 500+ sales which I knew was ONLY possible with a larger audience size.

Changing Things up a Bit

This month, I decided enough is enough and started to test heavily with U.S. I launched about 100 campaigns in the space of 2 weeks and found a few really big winners, (audience size 5 million+). Because of this I was able to sell 500+ shirts/hoodies and have campaigns run for a good month. Things felt more ‘passive’ and I started to feel like I found a solution to my 3-4k months.

From now on I’m focusing on making things work in the United States, you just can’t beat the scaling potential there.

Scaling The Right Way

Every time I would have a successful campaign that was giving me decent, consistent ROI, I’d try increase the budget/scale it. E.g, if I was spending $50 and bringing in $100, I’d try maintain the 100% ROI and increase budget to $100, expecting $200 in revenue.

Each and every time I did this, my revenue would stay the same or barely increase! I just couldn’t figure out why. This time around I decided to do things differently. I broke my winning campaign into multiple ad sets by set age groups. E.g, if my campaign was working for 40-65 year olds, I’d split it to,

40-45,
46-50,
51-55,
56-60,
60-65,
65+

I’d put $20-$50 towards each of these ad sets depending on which age groups were converting the best and monitor the campaign for a few days. The age sets that were doing well, I’d increase ONLY those budgets and keep the average performers with low budgets. This is probably common knowledge and you’d think I’d have figured it out by now but I hadn’t. By doing this I was successfully able to scale one of my campaigns from spending $200/day to $600/day! It’s still bringing in 100%+ ROI which is about 1.2k in revenue alone which is awesome. The audience size is 10 million+ so needless to say it’s a killer campaign. I’m expecting at least 2,000 sales at $20 per sale, ($40k), out of which a good 20k should be profit.

Increasing Profits with Jumpers

Christmas time was great for a lot of Teespringers that found success in Christmas Jumpers. I personally know someone who made 250k in November doing this. After reading his success story on Aff Playbook, I decided to give it a go! I got a couple working but got in way too late so couldn’t really make much with it.

HOWEVER, I found something really interesting. Something that’s increased my profits by over 30%. The base cost for jumpers was only $10-$13 compared to Hoodies at $20-$23! This means that I’d pocket $28 per sale instead of $17 if I were to push Jumpers instead of Hoodies.

Trying this theory out, I made a few campaigns where the feature product was a jumper, not a T-Shirt or Hoodie. Eventually I started selling at the same rate as my Hoodie campaigns, only this time was making much more per sale!

I recommend you guys to try it. Higher profit margins means more profit. You should be aiming to increase your revenue and decrease costs in every possible way and this is a definite way to increase your revenue.

Still Learning New Things

I’ve been focusing 100% on Teespring for pretty much all of 2014. It’s amazing how I’m STILL learning new things.

E.g, this month I learned,

– Scaling while maintaining good ROI
– Focusing on U.S.
– Pushing Jumpers to increase profits
– I’m sure there were more,

Bottom line, you can never call yourself a guru at something as you’ll always remain a student. Sure, you’ll be miles ahead of others but there will always be something more to learn which can further better your business. It just amazes me how I keep learning things from others even now and makes me feel like people wanting to get Teespring right straight off the bat are setting themselves up for disaster.

I’ve said it before, you need to treat Affiliate Marketing like a marathon not a sprint. You’ll have considerably more failures than successes, it’s just the nature of business. The main thing is pushing on and increasing your knowledge to the point where more of your decisions will be successes than ‘failures’.

Input VS Output

Prior to this month, I’ve been working quite a lot. About 4 hours per day to maintain my income at $200 profit/day. This month however, I started of REAL strong. 5-6 hour days, 10-15 campaigns per day. One week later I started slacking and the whole holiday mood started to take effect. Second week later I was barely working but luckily by that time I had found some massive campaigns.

I started working around 1 hour a day, mostly updating stats and launching the odd 1-2 campaigns but since I was bringing in a good income and knew it would continue for a good 2-3 weeks, I started to get lazy.

The input VS Output ratio in this business is kind of everywhere. You have people in this business barely working at all and making huge numbers where as others have to work 10 hour days to sustain the same income. What’s the difference? A lot of things. Processes, Smarter work ethics, Outsourcing, Different Affiliate Models.

This month I worked about 2 hours TOPS on my blog and it made me 2.5k in revenue with almost 0 cost. THIS is the type of income I love. No work, barely any maintenance and still a decent, growing income. It made me think about what I want in my life. There’s no point earning a lot of money when you’ve got to be stuck behind your computer to earn it.

Moving Forward

It’s 2015 as I’m writing this and I’ve achieved a lot of my goals I set in 2014. However, most of my activities was based on short term goals. This time, I want to look in the future and make decisions that increase my income and at the same time DECREASE the time spent earning it.

Ideally I’d like to work 4-10 hours a week and make 5 figures a month. To do this, I need to get myself out of Teespring. Either outsource a lot of the processes or stop it entirely and focus on other, long term affiliate models. My own product, blog growth, my own websites, etc.

before my focus was making a lot of money. Now it’s freeing up my time and focusing on my health and personal life. Let’s see what 2015 will bring. Hopefully success in every way for all. As long as we remember to put in the hard work, everything is possible.

What are Your Goals for 2015?

Mine are to build a more stable business. None of this 1k one month and 20k the next. I want to be hitting 20k EVERY month. To do this, I need to focus on asset building on not just the Teespring hit and run. I hope to,

– Build a 5 figure/month organic business. Something similar to this blog.

– Network with all the top affiliates in this industry. Not a fake ‘I help you, you help me relationship’, but a genuine one where we can just chat about non-affiliate related things and still enjoy each others company.

– Another 6 figure year. I made about 143k USD profit in 2014. I want to maintain 6 figures.

Comment Below on what you guys want to achieve. Good luck for 2015!

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